Ok, maybe not a direct Rose comment, but did anyone notice that when Sigma said to the Doctor "Your song must end soon" they played the haunting music from the beach scene in Doomsday? Coincedence? I think NOT!!!

To be honest, I think this was a pretty weak episode overall, with the Doctor and Donna occasionally acting out of character and the humor falling flat. Another problem I had was the fact that the writer obviously borrowed heavily from the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game in re-imaging the Ood - so much so the BBC could be slapped with copyright infringement if the company making the game decided to push the issue. There is a race of Octopus-like creatures in D&D that are telepathic and share a hive mind dominated by a giant brain. Granted, some of these features in the Ood, such as telepathy, came from The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, but Temple (the writer) obviously was using the D&D creatures as a template for fleshing out the Ood. Again, I'm disappointed in the episode overall, but I'm betting it will be the exception rather than the rule this season.

Hm, 'Your song must end soon'.The Ood use a song as their collective mind, so this could be foreshadowing that Doctor's song/link with Donna, Martha, Rose will break at the end of the series.

Or the opposite, the Ood could've taken Doctor's words "I've got a song of my own" to mean that his song is solitary and he's the last of his kind, so it could foreshadow the end of the Time War and come back of the Time Lords.

Indeed, there's clearly a link between Mind Flayers and Cthulhu, but the Mind Flayers are specifically a race of psychic octopoid humanoids who also have a "mother brain" at the heart of their psychic network. If they didn't borrow that from D&D, I'd be very surprised.

Only geeks like me would notice the similarities, but they are definitely there. For non-geeks, look up "illithid" and you'll see what I mean. Hell, someone has even updated the wikipedia entry on illithids to point out the Doctor Who link. I hope this is a case of borrowing and not outright plagiarism.

There are some similarities, but ultimately the Ood and the Mind Flayers serve vastly different roles in their respective settings and for me, at least, that's always what's important. You couldn't tell an Ood story with an Illithid, though vice versa isn't nessicarily true since 'slaves become slavers' is an old saw.

As for "below", well, come on now: we're all geeks here. If you don't dig the game, that's your bag, but folks who do aren't somehow less creative because of it. If you're going to yell 'plagiarism!' every time something draws from the same well, you're going to be spending all day doing it-I mean, both sources draw from Lovecraft, among others, who ultimately drew a lot of his ideas by applying the mythology of sea monsters to the human mind and spirit, instead of just as physical creatures.

it was two o's for ood operationsI think its inevitable that some ideas will be similar. sometimes i write my own doctor who stories and i find myself writing stuff thats like existing episodes without knowing it

Just a few rambles. In ‘Dalek’ and ‘The Long Game’ Adam Mitchell was a boy genius. He also nearly started a world war by hacking the US defence system when he was eight, so he has a taste for war. Could ATMOS have something to do with him and his ability to ‘spike’? At the end of the episode, the Editor on Satellite 5 told the Doctor and Rose that Adam knew everything about the Doctor, which would include the ability to travel in time. When Adam ‘spiked’ he broadcast that information on 600 channels. The Doctor says, ‘The archive of Satellite 5, one second of that message could have changed the world. The whole of history could have changed because of you’. If the planets and bee’s etc. are disappearing then that points to history being changed... or manipulated. Another thought...could the Dalek have picked up that information too, giving them the gift of time travel? (In ‘Fires of Pompeii’, the Doctor asks who gave them the means to time travel)BTW, Great site Jess!